Live Labs Blog: Cumbria’s plastic roads - the journey so far
Our latest blog talks about the Cumbria’s Live Labs project.
Cumbria’s Live Labs project is centred around the use of unrecyclable waste plastic in highways construction. Specifically, the suitability and sustainability of using waste plastic as an additive in highways construction and what the effects and options are in terms of carbon reduction, performance improvements and contributing to a circular economy.
The Live Labs programme has brought more to Cumbria than just innovation in construction: the project has involved new opportunity for collaboration. The three core surfacing contractors have worked with each other as well as directly with consultants, universities, and laboratory testing companies.
Within Cumbria, and I assume within most other authorities, consultants typically work on a one-to-one basis; that is to say, one client and one consultant per project. WSP as project consultancy partner have done an outstanding job of coordinating works, research, information gathering and undertaking literature reviews from all the partners.
This has included Hanson, the University of Nottingham, MacRebur, Aggregate Industries PTS, Shell and DSD, and many of the partners working directly with each other too. This fresh approach is something that we will learn from and continue into the future with other projects.
Being part of the wider Live Labs programme has also provided many new collaboration opportunities, both for me as project pead and the Council as a whole. The Council has always been active within the highways industry, but the last two years has allowed new networks to be made and introduced members of the team to a huge array of industry professionals and allowed us to tap into a wealth of knowledge.
We have also found that the programme has provided options for Cumbria to continue decarbonisation work post Live Labs. We are looking to take away ideas from other Labs, such as lighting developments to complement our existing lighting improvement programme. We have also spoken with other authorities such as Kent to share our knowledge and experience with flood monitoring and gully sensors.
As Baroness Brown said at the ADEPT Autumn Conference last November, we need to accept failure more, we need to push technology and innovation to breaking point to push the boundaries and learn. However, it is no secret that both revenue and capital budgets for local authorities are getting more and more constrained.
Cumbria alone has had to make savings of over £289m in the last 10 years. So quite often there isn’t the budgetary freedom to take risks or to try and be innovative. We have previously worked with MacRebur as part of the standard Highways Capital Programme, but never had the financial freedom to be able to thoroughly monitor, test and review information. The Live Labs programme has provided the opportunity to do exactly that.
A key outcome of the project is the provision of a fully independent research report. Initially WSP collated a huge library of existing information from partners and existing international research to show the gaps which needed filling. They then went on to develop site selection criteria, testing requirements, design options and so forth to pull together all the information possible within the budgetary and time constraints.
In order to ensure fair and consistent monitoring of all products used, the final surfacing scheme that was undertaken was selected to allow the three different plastic derived additives to be used alongside control samples in one surfacing scheme. The site will be monitored for the next five years, and results will be fed back to the Live Labs document library. With roads designed to last 15-20 years or more, Cumbria’s Live Labs project represents a snapshot in time. Therefore, it is imperative Cumbria, along with its partners, continue to feed information and testing data into the Live Labs Library.
There have been some steep learning curves along the way: we have faced a number of challenges and problems across a range of areas such as procurement, legal, technology, IP rights, communications and data retrieval. Each challenge has provided a lesson learnt which we will carry forward in future projects.
Being involved in the programme has opened up innovation and decarbonisation partnerships which will hopefully extend beyond that of Live Labs 1 and possibly help Cumbria become part of Live Labs 2. Cumbria feel that this is just the start of a continued journey into innovation both on and off the highway, building on existing programmes of and use of technology in services across the council.